China orders the government and state-owned companies to stop using foreign PCs, and the beneficiary would be Linux

This is not the first time we have reported such news, nor will it be the last. Sometimes, a government has advised to stop using Windows because of the licenses, because they are expensive and, for example, moving from Windows 7 to 10 can be very expensive. But other types of news are also published, those that affirm that they intend to use free software so as not to depend on another that usually comes from the US. The latest news about something like this is also about the hardware, and that is that the Government of China wants national brands to be used.

So and how we read at Bloomberg, the term they would be considering would be as short as two years. It's a swift and aggressive order that falls far short of Donald Trump's proposal for Apple to make all of its devices in the United States. With this, about 50 million computers would be replaced, that only by the Government of China. And it is that what they want is that state companies also start using Chinese computers.

China would stop using foreign computers in two years

Although the term given this week has been only two years, the truth is that about ten years ago they began to deal with the subject. Among those affected would be HP and Dell, the most used brands in China, and the main beneficiary would be Lenovo. There are more brands, but this is the most popular inside and outside the Asian country. Shares of computer brands such as HP and Dell have fallen sharply in recent hours due to this news.

And the software they would use, effectively, would be one based on Linux. "Linux" is a kernel, basically drivers so that an operating system can run on any computer, which was Linus Torvalds' final year project. GNU/Linux systems can take many forms, and as examples we have Ubuntu Kylin, which is an Ubuntu intended for the Chinese public, and desktops like CDE, Cutefish, etc. They could even create their own distribution to be used by the government and state-owned companies, but the only sure thing is that, if all this is true in the end, they will not use Windows or macOS because they are both American operating systems.

In two years we will see how all this ends.